Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Ari Feb 2010
there are so many places to hide,

in my home at 17th and South screaming death threats at my roommates laughing diabolically playing  videogames and Jeopardy cooking quinoa stretching canvas the dog going mad frothing lunging  spastic to get the monkeys or the wookies or whatever random commandments we issue forth  drunken while Schlock rampages the backdrop,

at my uncle's row house on 22nd and Wallace with my shoes off freezing skipping class to watch March  Madness unwrapping waxpaper hoagies grimacing with each sip of Cherrywine or creamsicle  soda reading chapters at my leisure,

in the stacks among fiberglass and eternal florescent lima-tiled and echo-prone red-eyed and white-faced  caked with asbestos and headphones exhuming ossified pages from layers of cosmic dust  presiding benevolent,

in University City disguised in nothing but a name infiltrating Penn club soccer getting caught after  scoring yet still invited to the pure ***** joy of hell and heaven house parties of ice luge jungle  juice kegstand coke politic networking,

at Drexel's nightlit astroturf with the Jamaicans rolling blunts on the sidelines playing soccer floating in  slo-mo through billows of purple till the early morning or basketball at Penn against goggle- eyed professors in kneepads and copious sweat,

in the shadow tunnels behind Franklin Field always late night loner overlooking rust belt rails abandoned  to an absent tempo till tomorrow never looking behind me in the fear that someone is there,

at Phillies Stadium on glorious summer Tuesdays for dollar dog night laden with algebra geometry and  physics purposely forgetting to apply ballistics to the majestic arc of a home run or in the frozen  subway steam selling F.U. T.O. t-shirts to Eagles fans gnashing when the Cowboys come to town,

at 17th and Sansom in the morning bounding from Little Pete's scrambled eggs toast and black coffee  studying in the Spring thinking All is Full of Love in my ears leaving fog pollen footprints on the  smoking cement blooming,

at the Shambhala Center with dharma lotus dripping from heels soaking rosewater insides thrumming to the  groan of meditation,

at the Art Museum Greco-fleshed and ponderous counting tourists running the Rocky steps staring into shoji screen tatame teahouses,

at the Lebanese place plunked boldly in Reading Terminal Market buying hummus bumping past the Polish  and Irish on my way to the Amish with their wheelwagons packed with pretzels and honey and  chocolate and tea,

at the motheaten thrift store on North Broad buried under sad accumulations of ramshackle clothing  clowning ridiculous in the dim squinting at coathangers through magnifying glasses and mudflat  leather hoping to salvage something insane,

in the brown catacombed warrens of gutted Subterranea trying unsuccessfully to ignore bearded medicine

men adorned with shaman shell necklaces hawking incense bootlegs and broken Zippos halting conversation to listen pensive to the displacement of air after each train hurtles by,

at 30th Street Station cathedral sitting dwarfed by columns Herculean in their ascent and golden light  thunderclap whirligig wings on high circling the luminous waiting sprawled nascent on stringwood pews,

at the Masonic Temple next to City Hall, pretending to be a tourist all the while hoping scouring for clues in the cryptic grand architect apocrypha to expose global conspiracies,

at the Trocadero Electric Factory TLA Khyber Unitarian Church dungeon breaking my neck to basso  perfecto glitch kick drums with a giant's foot stampeding breakbeat holographic mind-boggled  hole-in-the-skull intonations,

at the Medusa Lounge Tritone Bob and Barbara's Silk City et cetera with a pitcher a pounder of Pabst and a  shot of Jim Beam glowing in the dark at the foosball table disco ball bopstepping to hip hop and  jazz and accordions and piano and vinyl,

in gray Fishtown at Gino's recording rap holding pizza debates on the ethics of sampling anything by  David Axelrod rattling tambourines and smiles at the Russian shopgirl downstairs still chained to  soul record crackles of antiquity spiraling from windows above,

at Sam Doom's on 12th and Spring Garden crafting friendship in greenhouse egg crate foam closets  breaking to scrutinize cinema and celebrate Thanksgiving blessed by holy chef Kronick,

in the company of Emily all over or in Kohn's Antiques salvaging for consanguinity and quirky heirlooms  discussing mortality and cancer and celestial funk chord blues as a cosmological constant and  communism and Cuba over mango brown rice plantains baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies,

in a Coca Cola truck riding shotgun hot as hell hungover below the raging Kensington El at 6 AM nodding soft to the teamsters' curses the snagglesouled destitute crawling forth poisoned from sheet-metal shanty cardboard box projects this is not desolate,

at the impound lot yet again accusing tow trucks of false pretext paying up sheepish swearing I'll have my  revenge,

in the afterhour streets practicing trashcan kung fu and cinder block shotput shouting sauvage operatic at  tattooed bike messenger tribesmen pitstopped at the food trucks,

in the embrace of those I don't love the names sometimes rush at me drowned and I pray to myself for  asylum,

in the ciphers I host always at least 8 emcee lyric clerics summoning elemental until every pore ruptures  and their eyes erupt furious forever the profound voice of dreadlocked Will still haunting stray  bullet shuffles six years later,

in the caldera of Center City with everyone craning our skulls skyward past the stepped skyscrapers  beaming ear-to-ear welcoming acid sun rain melting maddeningly to reconstitute as concrete  rubber steel glass glowing nymphs,

in Philadelphia where every angle is accounted for and every megawatt careers into every throbbing wall where  Art is a mirror universe for every event ever volleyed through the neurons of History,

in Philadelphia of so many places to hide I am altogether as a funnel cloud frenetic roiling imbuing every corner sanctum sanctorum with jackhammer electromagnetism quivering current realizing stupefied I have failed so utterly wonderful human for in seeking to hide I have found

in Philadelphia
My best Ginsberg impression.
SK Fisher Oct 2011
Yeah those wild hooligans, those mini hell raisers
What was their motive? to be trail blazers?
  
They're smoking squares, and sneaking out
Facing alota scares, but never cry a shout

They're simply cool, calm and destructive
Shoutin out obscenities, and being abruptive

Yeah the boys remain true, to themselves and their crew
Simply bein themselves, and  askin who are you?
Maxine Robbins Sep 2014
Sometimes I like to think
That you just moved real far away
And that you got a job being a jeweler
At a different far away jewelry store
Because you hated working
For your father who never
Believed in you the right way
And that you just couldn’t drive
That silly old van hours to see us

And then I remember
I drive that van now
I have your guitars on your rack
In my room near the window
Eggay the cat is here
Not at your Fishtown Philadelphia house
I wear your ratty denim coat
To school to feel your embrace
When I cannot keep a smile on
I keep your bifocals locked up
In a display case with your
Memorial pamphlet
That says you were buried
On January twenty first
Of two thousand ten.

I do wonder on days like this
What you’ll say to me
When we see each other again
I wonder if your tears will be so real
Like they were when we had to leave
The vacation early because I ****** it up

I wish I could inhale your scent
Of cigarettes and beer and
Father

I wish I could remember what you sounded like
So crisp in my head
Yet the fear you caused absent in my nerves

I still remember every tattoo you had
Encompassing your whole body
In a beautiful mural
Like the ones we’d see
When you drove us from mother’s home
To yours

You had Julia in purple on your left shoulder
Overseeing the chinese dragon
That flew through the mountains and sunshine on your arm

Rayna’s name was inked underneath that same arm
And my name inked underneath the right
Mine sitting underneath another dragon
Sweeping through a thunderstorm

On your one leg was a blue diamond
A homage to your passion and your life
On the other was a daddy sea horse
With its two babies in tow

On your back was a few odd ones
Aliens smoking a joint in their ship
A heart made out of machinery
And knuckles punching someone’s teeth out

I remember being so proud
To have a daddy who was so
Unapologetically himself
Despite him being unapologetic
When he hurt people

And I am still proud to say
I am your daughter
Who is just as uniquely unapologetic
For who I am
As you were
Love you daddy
Cade Nov 2017
you sit next to me, warmth radiating off your posed form,
giving me a sense of mars, alien and cold, but warm on the inside,
you fill me with feeling, a longing for a fishtown I’ve never known,
where it is grey and green and iridescent, and calm,
and you give me long conversations, in a car when it’s raining,
philosophizing with our minds, until we move to the back, and use our bodies,
and you are hard to predict, being an ever shifting scape of thoughts,
flipping feelings like a coin, full of potential, wild and unrestricted,
I wouldn’t change you from the fluid form you currently possess,
moving like water, graceful, and dangerous,
and when you ***** up your face, I use the moment,
to watch you freely, feeling lucky

— The End —